Machine Journey is a pamphlet of meanderings, listings and questions being asked. It holds our attention in the dramatic scenes of ‘Encounter with the Angel’ and ‘Detective,’ appeals to us in ‘The Writer’ about overcoming blockage and Imposter Syndrome, and charms in the wonderfully rhythmic ‘Slough in my dreams.’ Darting between place and time, the poet maintains a consistent voice and style through this collection of mostly prose poems.
Doyle’s final entry in this pamphlet, ‘The Perfect Stroke,’ was the work that fascinated me most. Robert Frost once said, ‘No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader,’ and I can’t help wonder if the poet had a plan when he began writing this poem.
Insightful, precise, alluring and mysterious, this poem drifts from the obvious to the … not so obvious. Each stanza begins ‘The best thing about swimming is …’ before exploring a sense of challenge, ‘I can swim from start to finish with only two breaths,’ then ‘that sense of freedom. / No clothes or money or shoes, just your swimming trunks, / goggles and a locker key.’
Lists are a feature of many of Doyle’s poems, and this serves to lull us into a methodical rhythm, pleasantly subdued for when something out of the ordinary appears. And that’s precisely what happens here, as ‘the other swimmer’ appears at the end of each section: ‘My eyesight is much better with / my goggles but I could only glimpse a blurry shape moving / through the water.’
‘Every time I stopped to look / across, the swimmer turned around and dived deep.’ Depth is a point of intrigue for me – the casual reference to the beauty of swimming, how the water becomes you, then this other creature emerges, dives, and the poet is suddenly questioning our ancestry, back to when ‘humans were / semi-aquatic and this is why you can submerge a newborn / in water and they will hold their breath and start paddling.’
In the final stanza we arrive at ‘the perfect stroke,’ the ‘sweet spot’ where the subject is at one with their environment, twisting and moving, evolving into something quite other. I can say no more without spoiling the poem, other than Doyle concludes with a sudden turn which he is adept at reproducing throughout his work – a skill which makes his poetry fun, engaging and full of surprise.
We had the pleasure of interviewing Richard about his new chapbook...
1. How long have you been writing poetry, and did anything in particular inspire you to start?
Genre fiction and plays dominated my reading for many years until I took the plunge and completed a Diploma in Creative Writing in 2006. That was where my poetic journey began. The inspiration was a simple desire to start writing my own stories.
2. When you are writing poetry, do you find certain themes and topics reoccur in your work?
In terms of recurring themes, I often return to dystopias or alternative presents. Otherwise I just like to explore where the writing can take me.
3. Do you have any favourite poets, and have you ever tried to emulate their style? If so, how did that go?
Robert Frost and Malcolm Lowry both feature in the opening poem of Machine Journey. Simon Armitage, Luke Kennard, Jose Luis Borges, Fernando Pessoa and Pablo Neruda are my favourite poets to read.
I would love to match the brevity of Frost but I feel my prose has more of the meandering Borgesian style.
4. ‘Machine Journey’ is classed as prose poetry. When does a poem become a story (full prose), and how do you navigate classifying your work?
There is a rich hinterland between prose poetry and prose fiction or flash fiction. My favourite fiction authors either start out as poets or are deeply aware of the expressive power of poetic prose. David Mitchell has a page-long paragraph in “The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet” that describes the flight of seagulls over Nagasaki that for me is simply breathtaking. I am relaxed about the classification of my poems as long as the reader can connect with my writing.
5. What do you hope for your chapbook’s release, in terms of how a reader might experience ‘Machine Journey’?
My hope is that the reader can take all the images and ideas expressed in Machine Journey and form their own vision of our collective future and the power of prose to inspire.
This is a strange and eclectic collection of verse and prose. There are poems about being a writer and how he shuffles scenes of death and dramatic entrances. It is the first collection that I have read that had something about Slough of all places.
He moves from the Stone Age with the poem called the Stone Computer about the screen that has not displayed an image for hundreds of years to the far future and a trip to Mars.
I particularly liked the Collision With A Greenberg, kind of a green punk story about an event that took place and Encounter with an Angel where someone has an angel reach out to touch them and The Trouble With Spaceships and novel and possibly illegal ways of travelling to Mars.
I liked this short collection. Doyle has drawn on subjects that are niche and wide-ranging. They are quirky and infused with gentle humour and are a pleasure to read.
